Miscellanies 2.4.15

But the unbelievers, it seems, drag everything from heaven and the invisible to earth, literally grasping rocks and oaks with their hands, according to Plato; for, laying hold of all such things, they insist that only that exists which offers resistance and touch, defining body and essence as the same. And those who dispute with them defend themselves very cautiously from above, from somewhere invisible, compelling that certain intelligible and bodiless forms are the true essence. “Behold, I make new things,” says the Word, “which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man”: with a new eye, a new hearing, a new heart, whatever can be seen, heard, and grasped through faith and understanding, when the Lord's disciples speak, hear, and act spiritually. For there is genuine coin and another counterfeit, which deceives the unskilled no less, but not the money-changers, who have learned to separate and distinguish the counterfeit from the genuine. So the money-changer tells the unskilled only that the coin is counterfeit; but how, only the banker's apprentice, trained for this, learns. Aristotle says that the judgment following knowledge, that this particular thing is true, is faith. Faith, then, is more authoritative than knowledge and is its criterion.